Cinema and Its Discontents: Jacques Rancière and Film Theory

Author(s): Tom Conley

Source: SubStance , 2005, Vol. 34, No. 3, Issue 108: French Cinema Studies 1920s to the
Present (2005), pp. 96-106
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Cinema and its Discontents:
Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory
Tom Conley

Jacques Ranciere may have entered a French pantheon of film theor

in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical an
contemporary films in La fable cinematographique. In that book Rancie
posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood
Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation b
reconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos, the
rationale of a plot, over opsis, the "sentient effect of the spectacle." T
camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various
resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramati
progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when t
camera records information and evokes sensations that go both again
the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of whi
are beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with t
narrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Ranciere notes that t
intelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machi
that "records this infinity of movements that create a drama of
intensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune." The
camera, Ranciere continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of th
last pages of the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility
hardly reproduces things "such as they are gazed upon. It records them
such as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to b
He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience
the first pages of his Cinema 2: L'Image-temps, when he describes things "i
their state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as object
persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrativ
properties" (8). Ranciere shows that Epstein intuited the power of fil
even before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressive
force of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epstein
might have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventh
art, and anticipating a good deal of film theory.
Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Ranciere, are based on pre-Romanti
aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Heg

? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2005

96 SubStance #108, Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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Ranciere on Cinema and its Discontents 97

The German school inaugurated, as Deleuz

recall, an "aesthetic age" (16) that follo
inherited mimetic arts. The passive registe
doubles the intensity of the spectator's int
causes conscious and unconscious elements of the work to be of a same

texture. It dislocates the artistic privilege that a creator had own

when he or she was said to "impose a vision" upon a form. Ranciere th
complicates the point when he notes that the "machinic mechanism"
[dispositifmachinique] of cinema in fact suppresses the "active labor of thi
becoming-passive" (17) because it is in all events already and alw
passive in nature. It hinders [contrarie] the aims of "modernist" aesthe
in which it is found, by opposing the aesthetic autonomy of art to
former submission to a representational mission (17). In the new aesthe
age, art can be found anywhere and everywhere, and so too can aesthe
values, all over and about the frame. Yet cinema works against--hinde
thwarts, even runs contrary to--its own tendency to follow the new
aesthetic principles it heralds. That is why Ranciere define
cinematographic fable as a fable running contrary to itself. The fable
narration belonging to Aristotelian poetics is undone by the art of t
camera, but the camera cannot fail to let its gaze concatenate the man
sensations and impressions it brings forward, thus also belonging to t
narrative arts.
Unlike Andre Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Rancikre cannot countena
a pure cinema of the kind that the former championed in Charlie Chapl
burlesque gestures, if only because the clownish tramp already belo
to an established aesthetics predating cinema and outside of its pur
an issue that Chaplin makes especially clear when he is the love
clown in the pre-cinematic space par excellence represented in a film
The Circus. Nor can Ranciere find in Deleuze's immense debt to Ba
made manifest in the pages about the time-image that inaugurate Ci
2 concerning the image-fact (coined in Bazin's chapters of Qu-est-ce
cinema? on Rossellini's Paisan) those "pure" optical and aural situat
proper to film and film alone. Ranciere dismisses Bazin's idea that i
"great fables of errancy" an auteur like Rossellini shows the ways
the camera discerns infinitesimal signs that would allow us to glim
"the spiritual secret of things" (20-21).
Rather, a dialectics inheres in these images that inform so much
canonical film theory. Great films, notably those he studies in La f
cine'matographique, vary on what he calls a "fable split and divided" agai
itself. The cinematic fable plays with and against its literary, paint
and theatrical correlates. The theory that percolates through the el

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 98 Tom Conley

analyses in La fabl
works within an
philosophers had
centuries ago. Ra
detailed scrutiny o
(2004), a book of es
contrarities --in
themselves.2 The t
analytical geograph
aesthetic theory in
The guiding prin
written no doubt after Ranciere had assembled and reviewed a series of
seminars and lectures delivered at the University of Paris-VIII and at th
Collage International de Philosophie. They build on the paradoxes
cinematic contrariety informing La fable cinimatographique. Aesthet
canons that prevailed prior to 1789 separated art-objects from those
everyday life. The division loses ground when art is theorized as a writing
of both conscious and unconscious processes. Kant was symptomat
when he speculated that the new status of art inspired works not as
those of nature but of a non-human nature that does not submit to the will
a creator. Herein, concludes the critic, aesthetics is born as a discours
Insofar as narration or fabulation in general distinguished art-objects
from the experience of everyday life, in an earlier regime a law of mimesis
required the artist to be distinguished from the artisan or the entertainer.
The arts of representation dictated that an ordered regulation be kep
between a way of doing things (poiesis) and a way of being (aisthesis).
new order of art, and of "mimesis as we know it," called for the end o
aesthetic regulation, a rupture of what had guaranteed the hierarchie
of the fine arts. Such is the aesthetic regime born at the beginning of the
Romantic Age- a regime, Ranciere claims, that includes cinema prior t
its invention in a technical sense.
The ascendancy of the "new arts" can be seen in the way Chardin's
still-lives gained precedence over history painting, previously presumed
superior to the representations of objects, or in Gericault's unfinished
and nervously wrought drawings that eclipse David's staged tableaus,
or even in de Vigny's "La maison du berger," where the uneasiness of his
sense of nature, felt in the abstract setting, seems more veracious and
convincing than Lamartine's controlled dispensations of tears along the
shores of the Lac d'Annecy. These new arts "grasped and conceptualized
the fracture of the regime of identification in which the products of art

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Ranci're on Cinema and its Discontents 99

had been perceived and thought, the ruptur

(Malaise, 20) that former norms of mimesis
poiesis and aisthesis. Aesthetics are attenuat
name of aesthetics. Suddenly a fragment of
falls into the text: "Le malaise esth6tique est
(ibid.) [Aesthetic discontent is as old as aest
hereafter (presumably after 1800) is the
sensorium that Ranciere situates in a "lost human nature" that he
specifies as "a norm of adequation lost between an active faculty a
receptive faculty," that hereafter allows objects [choses] of art to
defined" (ibid.) as they are. This is followed by a rich reflection, bas
one of Stendhal's recollections in La Vie d'Henri Brulard, in which
narrator recalls childhood impressions of church bells pealing, the
of a water pump, and the notes of a neighbor's flute that marked him f
life. It contains a messianic promise of an aesthetic shift, promisi
radical change in the conditions of life:
Esthetics is the word that states the unique crux that resists being
thought [malaise' a penser], formed two centuries ago between the
sublimities of art and the noise of a water pump, between a veiled
timbre of chords and the promise of a new humanity. The discontent
[malaise] and resentment to which it gives rise today are always
turning around these two relations; the scandal of an art that gathers
in its forms and in its place the flotsam [n'importe quoi] of everyday
objects and the images of profane life; the exorbitant and mendacious
promises of an aesthetic revolution that had sought to transform the
forms of art into the forms of a new life. Aesthetics are accused of
being responsible for the flotsam of art; it is accused of having led art
astray in the fallacious promises of the philosophical absolute and of
social revolution. (25)
Aesthetics of the turn of the nineteenth century persists here and now. It
is seen in the way cinema is displaced into installation spaces in
contemporary museums (35). Film and video become confused when
digital processing replaces the material remainders of celluloid and
acetate. At stake is what Ranciere calls a politics of aesthetic distribution,
a distribution by which different roles and new social identities are
exchanged both in civic arenas and in museums and theaters. Much like
Stendhal's water pump, what was invisible or inaudible prior to the
French Revolution, then suddenly perceived, continues to bear affect in
the aesthetic regime of today. Similarly, it can be said that in a former
political and aesthetic situation, the form that an artist imposed on
matter was analogous to the power the state exerted on its masses-the
"power of the intelligent class over that of sensation, of people of culture
over those of nature" (46). The shift of these categories redistributes

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100 Tom Conley

power in ways that

equal measure in bo
Ranciere complicat
arts, which, unlike th
aesthetic aesthetics,
is, they reconsider an
vanguard creations
shocks, but mystifies
objects and works of
Mallarme's construc
(the poet's sublime t
foam of a wave or a
Jean-Luc Godard
Beethoven's string
beach along Lake G
connection he seeks
thrust of an amoro
in such a way that
end beach; the rom
discarded rose seren
a sheet of music th
(80-81). The aestheti
Ranciere take the sh
in that the film exe
cinema in the 1960s
with which a critique
reborn from the pur
(Malaise 81). No mor
mystery lays stress
At this point in the
resonance later in
"provocative dissens
attests to a praise of
as Nerval and Baude
But Ranciere sugge
"Problems and Tran
character in the po
that he subjects to c
political limbo. If a p
cultural force) of ci
is favored. Under

SubStance #

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Rancikre on Cinema and its Discontents 101

regretting the loss of the "common world" fo

now crafted for commercial ends and rife wit
be a reclusive, self-effacing and self-absorbed
the limits of his labor and the "very incertitude
one hand, the present is evaded when the arti
and on the other, a sense of the shrinkage
disappearance of "political inventivity" (ibid
no one is more aware of that moment than
themselves into a consensual body within the wo
houses featuring art films and early classical cin
deficit, witnessed now in our distance from t
attests to a malaise in aesthetics.
Cinematic questions take center stage in the last and concluding essay
of Malaise, "The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics," originally written
for the Forum of Caixa (Barcelona) under the theme of "Geographies of
Contemporary Thought." Ethics, he argues in the wake of the War on
Terror and the American-led invasion of Iraq, has acquired a self-
authenticating or auto-legislating force where politics are concerned. It
is a "general instance of normativity allowing consideration of the
validity of practices and discourses at work in particular spheres of
judgment and action" (145). Thus politics or art must yield to "moral
judgment bearing on the validity of their principles and the consequences
of their practices" (ibid.). In other words, if the train of thought is brutally
simplified or transposed onto another plane, art and politics must bear
the signs of "ethical values" in the battles fought against the Axis of Evil.
Ranciere quickly redresses this kind of misperception by recalling that
the role of ethics is in no way one of moral judgment to be exerted upon
art or politics. More perniciously, in light of a creeping consensus in the
intellectual world, ethics become a sphere where specific practices and
actions common to both art and politics, however separate they might
be, are dissolved. As are also the distinctions between fact and law or
the state of things and the way the state ought to be: in a geographical
sense, ethics is an intellectual process "establishing an identity between
an environment, a way of being and a principle of action" (146), but
today judgment follows the lead of the "power of law that imposes itself,"
but the radicality of the latter leaves no room for choice or creative
aberration. It gives way to a perpetual state of constraint and to "a
totally new dramaturgy of evil, justice, and infinite reparation" (ibid.).
Once again cinema plays a crucial role in the design of Ranciere's
argument. Two films, neither of which has much to say for itself, illustrate
the ethical turn and its dilemmas. The one, Lars von Trier's Dogville

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 102 Tom Conley

(2002), tells a tale ba

The protagonist wan
Where Brecht had
of the reigning eco
fable made clear th
camps and their ide
outside of itself. Th
served selflessly; d
entry. But her pa
domination to be un
the film elicits "depe
reproduction" (ibid.
Truants cleanses th
violence rules" -in
that we now know un
justice is appropriat
"Justice" is obtain
suppressed or diss
Such is the effect
(2002). An impulsiv
whom he mistaken
He is not punished,
policeman, is aware
Sean lets things sta
resolution there is,
aerial shot of the m
east Boston. Dogville
Ranciere, Mystic Riv
He tells of the false
scenarios by Hitchco
of Budd Boetticher,
classical mold, trut
and public opinion.
distributed thing i
of innocence and gu
between mental illness and social confusion. In Eastwood's scenario,
wrongly executed judgment is not suppressed. Instead, it is justice itself
that disappears. Social consensus and order must be maintained (we
recall the penultimate shots of the traditional Saint Patrick's Day parade
celebrating community in the streets of east Boston) at the cost of guilt
left unpunished.

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Ranciere on Cinema and its Discontents 103

Von Trier's Grace (Nicole Kidman) and

Robbins) personify what Ranciere calls the
porary experience. It is not a corrective agenc
suppression of the division that the very w
(152), the staunch separation of law from f
division that had opposed rights to facts. Th
division is consensus, a word that mistak
agreement about how to solve thorny po
greater likelihood is the essence of politics. A
by nature divided in respect to themselves and
while a consensual community amounts to t
peoples to one alone, "identical to the population
of the global community and the interests o
Consensus is what turns a political com
community. It is a world of one, in which every
Grace is not the agent of conflict; she never be
the people who rights the wrongs of custom
bland confines of an ethically correct commu
figure is neither here nor there. Dogville is a ne
community" that gets along as it does and m
who would wish to be its willing constituents
insight to link von Trier's politics to those
which "infinite justice is exercised against t
consensus come pre-emptive actions, le
calculatedly uneven distribution of goods,
those suppressing the rights of man, and so for
as Dogville and Mystic River make manifest,
absolute right be identified with the "securi
These two films inform Ranciere's descript
of what he calls the "ethical turn" in contem
messianic vision of progressist aesthetics, in
just society would result from the good wor
into a return of former catastrophe, a return
and soporific force of consensus) flattens th
itself. Such a phenomenon is seen in certa
Holocaust, in which little distinction is made between victims and
criminals, in which a redistribution of emotions is spread between "a
vision of art that devotes [consensus and infinite justice] to the service of
social bonding and another that devotes them to endless testimony to
the catastrophe" (159). It suffices to compare Godard's recent films to
those of the 1960s, when the shock of contraries in his collages belonged

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 104 Tom Conley

to the division ess

(Jack Palance) in Le
formes that Pierro
close-up of a Maiden
not far from wher
de Jeanne d'Arc. Go
Ranciere, the shock
to a world unto its
(albeit indistinct) c
of images (161-62).
Godard now obses
catastrophe, such as
sentable becomes a
aesthetic age; in th
impossibility with
from the Camps
pornographic form
Schindler's List) m
something resem
out of the past, du
them, and that wo
do, Ranciere does n
and Alain Resnais's i
In La fable cinima
against the grain o
after Auschwitz, b
the events calls no
rebirth, in Malaise
the recent study,
resembles contemp
ordinary objects, m
light, with empha
sensation.5 Along t
finds its cause and
witness to what ca
spectator an uneasy
also a consensus fo
Holocaust cinema,
catastrophe (those o
as adequate corre
aesthetics.

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Ranciere on Cinema and its Discontents 105

In a broad and sweeping move that takes l

in Lafable cinematographique of the founding p
(Murnau, Ray, Rossellini, Lang, Mann, Mark
(Bazin and Deleuze) and their shifts and redis
Ranciere writes in Malaise of what happened
of cinema in the context of the unsettling turn
has witnessed over the last two decades: firs
demise of the Soviet Union, the demolition of the Berlin wall, the
resurgence of the rights of victims on all sides in the messy wars in the
Balkans, and the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center on
9/11/01; and second, in a sphere of discontent over the politics of
globalization, the state of the European Union, the aftereffects of the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the rapid meltdown of the Arctic
and Antarctic poles. The cinematic register of Malaise and its analysis of
films, brief and cursory as they may be, address these dilemmas. What
Ranciere remarks unsettles. Dissensus, essential to any labor within
and about conflict and paradox-two vital elements of politics and
aesthetics-has all but disappeared.
Closer to film studies in a strict sense, Ranciere helps to show why in
theory and history two lines of inquiry have been drawn more boldly
over the past two decades. One, parallel to the return to former
catastrophes seen in Malaise, engages study of classical film, great auteurs,
and the origins of the medium as an object of history. With the return to
the past comes a tacit refusal to buy into contemporary spectacle. The
return has an impact on students who have been weaned on televisual
and digital spectacles, and for whom a silent film would be equivalent to
an incunabulum, just as a black-and-white image would be like a strip
of papyrus. It equally signals a malaise about the aesthetics and politics
of film pedagogy. To return to great auteurs as Ranciere had done in 2001
is to awaken a politics from the popcorn-scented consensus we smell in
malls and cineplexes all over the world. The historical malaise becomes
pervasive when it is felt that past cinemas are to be stabilized and written
off in the name of statistics (etymologically related to the modern state),
or in the name of historical sociology, or by other moves that attempt to
use idiolects of the past, especially in professional spheres, where users
prefer not to "redistribute" their force into the present moment. Ranciere
tells us why the past carries dissensus that has been elided from the
present.
Dashed and jagged, the other line of inquiry traces the state of things
in the unnamed realm in contemporary film, in a world saturated with
celluloid, where the classical canons of film theory no longer have

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 106 Tom Conley

currency. (Deep foc

well to digital cinem
edited to mix narra
medium needs to be
through pure cinep
analysis that comes
see as belonging to
few that follow this
of cinema.
Harvard University

Notes

1. La fable cinematographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 8. Here and elsewhere all translations
from the French are mine.

2. Malaise dans l'esthe'tique (Paris: Galil6e, 2004).

3. Here and elsewhere malaise is translated as "discontent" in order to engage Freud's
Civilization and its Discontents, which in French is Malaise dans la civilisation. As it will
be shown, Rancibre writes of a global malaise that extends to our civilization in
general.
4. Ranciere makes a similar point in La fable (190) when he asserts that the common labor
of art and politics is one of interruption of continuity, the "incessant substitution of
words that cause one to see and images that speak, that impose belief as the music of
the world." For Godard it is necessary to "divide the One of representative magma
into two: separate words and images, have words be heard in their uncanniness, have
images be seen in their stupidity." In Malaise it seems that the equivalence of art and
politics that he ascribes to Godard's brilliant "perversity" is somewhat attenuated.
5. His pages in another chapter of Malaise (77-78) on Christian Boltanski recoup to a
degree the remarks on Lanzmann.

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